As another anniversary of the holocaust in Hiroshima and Nagasaki passes by, this year's commemorations have rekindled the focus on the prospects of nuclear disarmament and achieving the goal of abolition of nuclear weapons. This sudden interest was generated by op-ed articles co-authored early this year by four U.S. statesmen - Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn. By now, their critics have abundantly highlighted the paradox in having to see realist strategic thinkers like Kissinger advocating abolition of nuclear weapons after spending their decades of active service in U.S. government propagating doctrines of nuclear deterrence and massive retaliation.

A section of establishmentarians in New Delhi have now caught on to this trend and are relentlessly projecting the virtues of India's disarmament activism, as done during the Cold War years. At hindsight, the government's decision to commemorate 20 years of the Rajiv Peace Plan, presented in a landmark speech to the United Nations by former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, looked like a political retort to the BJP's criticisms on the government's ignoring of the 10th anniversary of Pokharan tests. But for such intentions, the current political climate in New Delhi shadowed by the Indo-US nuclear deal, certainly did not call for any reference to dogmas which India had virtually discarded after 1998.

After all, the government has in the past one year or more vociferously declared to the country that the nuclear deal would not impinge on India's strategic weapons programme, implying that the programme would continue to progress. Proponents of the deal have tried to convince the nation that India's nuclear deterrent is well in place and that the deal would free up domestic resources to fuel its strategic weapons programme - an argument which had caught the fancy of the U.S. non-proliferation lobby. With so much of hype given on India's weapons programme, it sounded paradoxical to harp back on an agenda we had discarded in the din of the Cold War.

Two questions inevitably surface at this point of the debate. Why did Kissinger and Co. suddenly evoke a forgotten sentiment? Does India's disarmament activism contradict its nuclear weapons posture?

Despite the end of Cold War promising to be peaceful on the nuclear front, we have in the past few years witnessed a spurt in (potential) threshold states, notably denoted by North Korea, Iran and Syria. Various factors have contributed to the emergence of newer nuclear weapon aspirations, the most notable being a security deficit created by Bush administration's postures against the so called 'rogue states'. Though the Bush presidency had desired to surpass the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and suppress latent proliferation ambitions through its newly promoted counterproliferation mechanisms, such designs failed to achieve ground, and in turn triggered panic among these states, encouraging them to pursue the ultimate weapon to deter the US. Finding the going tough on threshold states and threatened by a surge of non-state actors, Washington's arms control saints have dramatically revived the idea of complete nuclear disarmament.

Though they managed to convince peaceniks across the globe on the relevance of nuclear disarmament, there are no indications on whether they have conveyed to Washington or its allied capitals the need to work on a disarmament roadmap. Rather, the op-ed by the foursome had more of a non-proliferation language, as spoken in Washington. Besides the usual emphasis on NPT compliance and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the article recommends de-alerting of nuclear warheads and carrying forward the arms reduction efforts between the US and Russia. However, the highlight of their proposal is the call for discarding the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) dogma and focusing on new deterrence arrangements based on multilateral ballistic missile defences.

In principle, the four statesmen have merely endorsed what President Bush declared in his May 2001 speech while calling for a revamping of the global nuclear order by moving away for Cold War era doctrines, and the rationale he propounded while withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. In fact, the reference to missile defence denotes the paradigm shift in the approach of deterrence theorists who now reflect the famous statement made by President Reagan while announcing the Star Wars Initiative - of building a missile shield that would make nuclear weapons 'obsolete'.

Significantly so, other than the emphasis on arms reduction and fissile material restrictions, the proposal had no game plan on a credible disarmament roadmap for weapon states. Why then should Indians be carried away by an idea borrowed from them by these 'reformed' advocates? Though India still holds allegiance to disarmament as a national value, its current advocacy on the nuclear deal and post 1998 nuclear weapon posture has been seen as contradictory to propagation of ideas like disarmament. However, in practice, the government has a carefully balanced strategy, whereby India argues that it would work towards complete disarmament but would maintain a minimum deterrent to meet the threats from its nuclear neighbours. This policy notwithstanding, Indian policy makers have realised the fact that disarmament would be an unachievable proposition for the near future, even as new threshold states emerge and existing weapon powers are synchronising their arsenals to meet newer technological goalposts.

Where then lies the future of disarmament? The most revolutionary approach was made by Shri. K. Subrahmanyam, India's pre-eminent strategic thinker, who has argued for de-legitimising nuclear weapons, as done in the case of chemical and biological weapons, to make its abolition politically feasible. However, the reality of the contemporary geo-politics is that no country, including India, would be ready to undertake such a step when nuclear weapons have sustained a level of stability and deterrence equations between nuclear weapons states.

Therefore, while total abolition would be an unrealistic task in the present context, there can be efforts towards numerical reduction of arsenals and steps taken towards making the probability of nuclear conflicts lesser. The article by Kissinger and others have shades of this thinking. Though nuclear deterrence would continue to be the cornerstone of the present power balancing, weapon states can work towards reduction of warheads as well as take steps for curtailing fissile materials production for nuclear weapons development.

However, the moot question here is whether India would be ready for a Fissile Materials Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT). And if so, should one assume that India's minimum deterrent would be credible enough for India to sign such a treaty?

A. Vinod Kumar is with the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. He can be contacted at vinodidsa@gmail.com.